English I/Ms.Tapia
Short Story Unit
Name: ___________________________________________
Date: _______________________ Period: _______________
parapet all around it about head-high and we’d found out a long time
before that no one, not even the watchman, paid any attention to the roof
because it was higher than any of the other buildings around. So my gang
used the roof as a headquarters. We could get up there by crossing over
to the fire escape from our own roof on a plank and then going on up. It
was a secret place for us, where nobody else could go without our
permission.
READING & ANNOTATION ASSIGNMENT:
1. Read the text once to get the gist of the story.
2. Read the story again, this time annotating the entire story.
3. Record a variety of lower and higher order thinking
annotations in the margins of the text.
4. Pay particular attention to the methods of
characterization the author uses to reveal the personality
traits of the protagonist.
5. Bring your annotated story to class and be prepared to
discuss the story as well as share your annotations.
I remember the day I first took T. J. up there to meet the gang. He was
a stocky, robust kid with a shock of white hair, nothing sissy about him
except his voice — he talked different from any of us and you noticed it
right away. But I liked him anyway, so I told him to come on up.
Antaeus
We climbed up over the parapet and dropped down on the roof. The
rest of the gang were already there.
Borden Deal (1922 - 1985):
"Hi," I said. I jerked my thumb at T. J. "He just moved into the
building yesterday."
This
was during the wartime, when lots of people were coming
North for jobs in factories and war industries, when people moved
around a lot more than they do now and sometimes kids were thrown
into new groups and new lives that were completely different from
anything they had ever known before. I remember this one kid, T. J. his
name was, from somewhere down South, whose family moved into our
building during that time. They’d come North with everything they
owned piled into the back seat of an old model sedan that you wouldn’t
expect could make the trip, with T. J. and his three younger sisters riding
shakily atop the load of junk.
He just stood there, not scared or anything, just looking, like the first
time you see somebody you’re not sure you’re going to like.
"Hi," Blackie said. "Where you from?"
"Marion County," T. J. said.
We laughed. "Marion County?" I said. "Where’s that?" He looked at
me like I was a stranger, too. "It’s in Alabama," he said, like I ought to
know where it was.
"What’s your name?" Charley said.
Our building was just like all the others there, with families crowded
into a few rooms, and I guess there were twenty five or thirty kids about
my age in that one building. Of course, there were a few of us who
formed a gang and ran together all the time after school, and I was the
one who brought T. J. in and started the whole thing.
"T. J.," he said, looking back at him. He had pale blue eyes that looked
washed out but he looked directly at Charley, waiting for his reaction.
He’ll be all right, I thought. No sissy in him ... except that voice. Who
ever talked like that?
The building right next door to us was a factory where they made
walking dolls. It was a low building with a flat, tarred roof that had a
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"T. J.," Blackie said. "That’s just initials. What’s your real name?
Nobody in the world has just initials."
what we want to ... watermelons and garden truck and no telling what
all."
"I do," he said. "And they’re T. J. That’s all the name I got."
"You’d have to be a good farmer to make these tar roofs grow any
watermelons," I said. We all laughed.
His voice was resolute with the knowledge of his rightness and for a
moment no one had anything to say. T. J. looked around at the rooftop
and down at the black tar under his feet. "Down yonder where I come
from," he said, "we played out in the woods. Don’t you all have no
woods around here?"
But T. J. looked serious. "We could haul us some dirt up here," he said.
"And spread it out even and water it and before you know it we’d have
us a crop in here." He looked at us intently. "Wouldn’t that be fun?"
"They wouldn’t let us," Blackie said quickly.
"I thought you said this was you all’s roof," T. J. said to me. "That
you‑ all could do anything you wanted up here."
"Naw," Blackie said. "There’s the park a few blocks over, but it’s full
of kids and cops and old women. You can’t do a thing."
"They’ve never bothered us," I said. I felt the idea beginning to catch
fire in me. It was a big idea and it took a while for it to sink in but the
more I thought about it the better I liked it. "Say," I said to the gang, "he
might have something there. Just make us a regular roof garden, with
flowers and grass and trees and everything. And all ours, too," I said.
"We wouldn’t let anybody up here except the ones we wanted to."
T. J. kept looking at the tar under his feet. "You mean you ain’t got no
fields to raise nothing in? No watermelons or nothing?"
"Naw," I said scornfully. "What do you want to grow something for?
The folks can buy everything they need at the store.
He looked at me again with that strange, unknowing look. "In Marion
County," he said, "I had my own acre of cotton and my own acre of corn.
It was mine to plant ever’ year."
"It’d take a while to grow trees," T. J. said quickly, but we weren’t
paying any attention to him. They were all talking about it suddenly, all
excited with the idea after I’d put it in a way they could catch hold of it.
Only rich people had roof gardens, we knew, and the idea of our own
private domain excited them.
He sounded like it was something to be proud of, and in some obscure
way it made the rest of us angry. "Heck!" Blackie said. "Who’d want to
have their own acre of cotton and corn? That’s just work. What can you
do with an acre of cotton and corn?"
"We could bring it up in sacks and boxes," Blackie said. "We’d have to
do it while the folks weren’t paying any attention to us. We’d have to
come up to the roof of our building and then cross over with it."
T. J. looked at him. "Well, you get part of the bale offen your acre," he
said seriously. "And I fed my acre of corn to my calf."
"Where could we get the dirt?" somebody said worriedly.
We didn’t really know what he was talking about, so we were more
puzzled than angry; otherwise, I guess, we’d have chased him off the
roof and wouldn’t let him be part of our gang. But he was strange and
different and we were all attracted by his stolid sense of rightness and
belonging, maybe by the strange softness of his voice contrasting our
own tones of speech into harshness.
"Out of those vacant lots over close to school," Blackie said.
"Nobody’d notice if we scraped it up."
I slapped T. J. on the shoulder. "Man, you had a wonderful idea," I
said, and everybody grinned at him, remembering he had started it. "Our
own private roof garden."
He moved his foot against the black tar. "We could make our own field
right here," he said softly, thoughtfully. "Come spring we could raise us
He grinned back. "It’ll be ourn," he said. "All ourn." Then he looked
thoughtful again. "Maybe I can lay my hands on some cotton seed, too.
You think we could raise us some cotton?"
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toward a goal that we couldn’t see, a particular point in time that would
be definitely marked by signs and wonders that only he could see.
We’d started big projects before at one time or another, like any gang
of kids, but they’d always petered out for lack of organization and
direction. But this one didn’t ... somehow or other T. J. kept it going all
through the winter months. He kept talking about the watermelons and
the cotton we’d raise, come spring, and when even that wouldn’t work
he’d switch around to my idea of flowers and grass and trees though he
was always honest enough to add that it’d take a while to get any trees
started. He always had it on his mind and he’d mention it in school,
getting them lined up to carry dirt that afternoon, saying in a casual way
that he reckoned a few more weeks ought to see the job through.
The laborious earth just lay there during the cold months, inert and
lifeless, the clods lumpy and cold under our feet when we walked over it.
But one day it rained and afterward there was a softness in the air and the
earth was alive and giving again with moisture and warmth. That evening
T. J. smelled the air, his nostrils dilating with the odor of the earth under
his feet.
"It’s spring," he said, and there was a gladness rising in his voice that
filled us all with the same feeling. "It’s mighty late for it, but it’s spring.
I’d just about decided it wasn’t never gonna get here at all."
Our little area of private earth grew slowly. T. J. was smart enough to
start in one corner of the building, heaping up the carried earth two or
three feet thick, so that we had an immediate result to look at, to
contemplate with awe. Some of the evenings T. J. alone was carrying
earth up to the building, the rest of the gang distracted by other
enterprises or interests, but T. J. kept plugging along on his own and
eventually we’d all come back to him and then our own little acre would
grow more rapidly.
We were all sniffing at the air, too, trying to smell it the way that T. J.
did, and I can still remember the sweet odor of the earth under our feet. It
was the first time in my life that spring and spring earth had meant
anything to me. I looked at T. J. then, knowing in a faint way the hunger
within him through the toilsome winter months, knowing the dream that
lay behind his plan. He was a new Antaeus, preparing his own bed of
strength.
"Planting time," he said. "We’ll have to find us some seed."
He was careful about the kind of dirt he’d let us carry up there and
more than once he dumped a sandy load over the parapet into the
areaway below because it wasn’t good enough. He found out the kinds of
earth in all the vacant lots for blocks around. He’d pick it up and feel it
and smell it, frozen though it was sometimes, and then he’d say it was
good, growing soil or it wasn’t worth anything and we’d have to go on
somewhere else.
"What do we do?" Blackie said. "How do we do it?"
"First we’ll have to break up the clods," T. J. said. "That won’t be hard
to do. Then we plant the seed and after a while they come up. Then you
got you a crop." He frowned. "But you ain’t got it raised yet. You got to
tend it and hoe it and take care of it and all the time it’s growing and
growing while you re awake and while you re asleep. Then you lay it by
when it’s growed and let it ripen and then you got you a crop."
Thinking about it now I don’t see how he kept us at it. It was hard
work, lugging paper sacks and boxes of dirt all the way up the stairs of
our own building, keeping out of the way of the grownups so they
wouldn’t catch on to what we were doing. They probably wouldn’t have
cared, for they didn’t pay much attention to us, but we wanted to keep it
secret anyway. Then we had to go through the trap door to our roof,
teeter over a plank to the fire escape, then climb two or three stories to
the parapet and drop down onto the roof. All that for a small pile of earth
that sometimes didn’t seem worth the effort. But T. J. kept the vision
bright within us, his words shrewd and calculated toward the fulfillment
of his dream; and he worked harder than any of us. He seemed driven
"There’s those wholesale seed houses over on Sixth," I said. "We could
probably swipe some grass seed over there."
T. J. looked at the earth. "You all seem mighty set on raising some
grass," he said. "I ain’t never put no effort into that. I spent all my life
trying not to raise grass."
"But it’s pretty." Blackie said. "We could play on it and take sunbaths
on it. Like having our own lawn. Lots of people got lawns."
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"Well," T. J. said. He looked at the rest of us, hesitant for the first time.
He kept on looking at us for a moment. "I did have it in mind to raise
some corn and vegetables. But we’ll plant grass."
T. J. had reserved a small section for watermelons and he was still
trying to find some seed for it. The wholesale house didn’t have any
watermelon seed and we didn’t know where we could lay our hands on
them. T. J. shaped the earth into mounds, ready to receive them, three
mounds lying in a straight line along the edge of the grass plot.
He was smart. He knew where to give in. And I don’t suppose it made
any difference to him really. He just wanted to grow something, even if it
was grass.
We had just about decided that we’d have to buy the seed if we were to
get them. It was a violation of our principles but we were anxious to get
the watermelons started. Somewhere or other, T. J. got his hands on a
seed catalogue and brought it one evening to our roof garden.
"Of course," he said. "I do think we ought to plant a row of
watermelons. They’d be mighty nice to eat while we was a laying on
that grass."
"We can order them now," he said, showing us the catalogue. "Look!"
We all laughed. "All rigth," I said. "We’ll plant us a row of
watermelons."
We all crowded around, looking at the fat, green watermelons pictured
in full color on the pages. Some of them were split open, showing the
red, tempting meat, making our mouths water.
Things went very quickly then. Perhaps half the roof was covered with
the earth, the half that wasn’t broken by ventilators, and we swiped
pocketfuls of grass seed from the open bins in the wholesale seed house,
mingling among the buyers on Saturdays and during the school lunch
hour. T. J. showed us how to prepare the earth, breaking up the clods and
smoothing it and sowing the grass seed. It looked rich and black now
with moisture, receiving of the seed, and it seemed that the grass sprang
up overnight, pale green in the early spring.
We couldn’t keep from looking at it, unable to believe that we had
created this delicate growth. We looked at T. J. with understanding now,
knowing the fulfillment of the plan he had carried alone within his mind.
We had worked without full understanding of the task but he had known
all the time.
"Now we got to scrape up some seed money," T. J. said, looking at us.
"I got a quarter. How much you all got?"
We made up a couple of dollars between us and T. J. nodded his head.
"That’ll be more than enough. Now we got to decide what kind to get. I
think them Kleckley Sweets. What do you all think?"
He was going into esoteric matters beyond our reach. We hadn’t even
known there were different kinds of melons. So we just nodded our
heads and agreed that yes, we thought the Kleckley Sweets, too.
"I’ll order them tonight," T. J. said. "We ought to have them in a few
days."
We found that we couldn’t walk or play on the delicate blades, as we
had expected to, but we didn’t mind. It was enough just to look at it, to
realize that it was the work of our own hands, and each evening the
whole gang was there, trying to measure the growth that had been
achieved that day.
Then an adult voice said behind us: "What are you boys doing up
here?"
It startled us for no one had ever come up here before, in all the time
we had been using the roof of the factory. We jerked around and saw
three men standing near the trap door at the other end of the roof. They
weren’t policemen, or night watchmen, but three men in plump business
suits, looking at us. They walked toward us.
One time a foot was placed on the plot of ground ... one time only
Blackie stepping onto it with sudden bravado. Then he looked at the
crushed blades and there was shame in his face. He did not do it again.
This was his grass, too, and not to be desecrated. No one said anything,
for it was not necessary.
"What are you boys doing up here?" the one in the middle said again.
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We stood still, guilt heavy among us, levied by the tone of voice, and
looked at the three strangers.
The men walked on without listening and descended clumsily through
the trap door. T. J. stood looking after them, his body tense with anger,
until they had disappeared. They wouldn’t even argue with him,
wouldn’t let him defend his earth rights.
The men stared at the grass flourishing behind us. "What’s this?" the
man said. "How did this get up here?"
He turned to us. "We won’t let ‘em do it," he said fiercely. "We’ll stay
up here all day tomorrow and the day after that and we won’t let ‘em do
it."
"Sure is growing good, ain’t it?" T. J. said conversationally. "We
planted it."
The men kept looking at the grass as if they didn’t believe
it. It was a thick carpet over the earth now, a patch of deep greenness
startling in the sterile industrial surroundings.
We just looked at him. We knew that there was no stopping it. He saw
it in our faces and his face wavered for a moment before he gripped it
into determination.
"Yes, sir," T. J. said proudly. "We toted that earth up here and planted
that grass." He fluttered the seed catalogue. "And we re just fixing to
plant us some watermelon."
"They ain’t got no right," he said. "It’s our earth. It’s our land. Can’t
nobody touch a man’s own land."
The man looked at him then, his eyes strange and faraway. "What do
you mean, putting this on the roof of my building?" he said. "Do you
want to go to jail?"
We kept on looking at him, listening to the words but knowing that it
was no use. The adult world had descended on us even in our richest
dream and we knew there was no calculating the adult world, no fighting
it, no winning against it.
T. J. looked shaken. The rest of us were silent, frightened by the
authority of his voice. We had grown up aware of adult authority, of
policemen and night watchmen and teachers, and this man sounded like
all the others. But it was a new thing to T. J.
We started moving slowly toward the parapet and the fire escape,
avoiding a last look at the green beauty of the earth that T. J. had planted
for us ... had planted deeply in our minds as well as in our experience.
We filed slowly over the edge and down the steps to the plank, T. J.
coming last, and all of us could feel the weight of his grief behind us.
"Well, you wan’t using the roof," T. J. said. He paused a moment and
added shrewdly, "so we just thought to pretty it up a little bit."
"Wait a minute," he said suddenly, his voice harsh with the effort of
calling. We stopped and turned, held by the tone of his voice, and looked
up at him standing above us on the fire escape.
"And sag it so I’d have to rebuild it," the man said sharply. He turned
away, saying to a man beside him. "See that all that junk is shoveled off
by tomorrow."
"We can’t stop them?" he said, looking down at us, his face strange in
the dusky light. "There ain’t no way to stop ‘em?"
"Yes, sir," the man said.
"No," Blackie said with finality. "They own the building."
T. J. started forward. "You can’t do that," he said. "We toted it up here
and it’s our earth. We planted it and raised it and toted it up here."
We stood still for a moment, looking up at T. J., caught into inaction by
the decision working in his face. He stared back at us and his face was
pale and mean in the poor light, with a bald nakedness in his skin like
cripples have sometimes.
The man stared at him coldly. "But it’s my building," he said. " It’s to
be shoveled off tomorrow."
"It’s our earth," T. J. said desperately. "You ain’t got no right!"
"They ain’t gonna touch my earth," he said fiercely. "They ain’t gonna
lay a hand on it! Come on."
5
They did not find him for two weeks. Then the Nashville police caught
him just outside the Nashville freight yards. He was walking along the
railroad track; still heading south, still heading home.
He turned around and started up the fire escape again, almost running
against the effort of climbing. We followed more slowly, not knowing
what he intended. By the time we reached him, he had seized a board and
thrust it into the soil, scooping it up and flinging it over the parapet into
the areaway below. He straightened and looked us squarely in the face.
"They can’t touch it," he said. "I won’t let ‘em lay a dirty hand on it!"
As for us, who had no remembered home to call us . . . none of us ever
again climbed the escape way to the roof.
We saw it then. He stooped to his labor again and we followed, the
gusts of his anger moving in frenzied labor among us as we scattered
along the edge of earth, scooping it and throwing it over the parapet,
destroying with anger the growth we had nurtured with such tender care.
The soil carried so laboriously upward to the light and the sun cascaded
swiftly into the dark areaway, the green blades of grass crumpled and
twisted in the falling.
*
*
*
*
Active Reader: ____________________________
It took less time than you would think ... the task of destruction is
infinitely easier than that of creation. We stopped at the end, leaving only
a scattering of loose soil, and when it was finally over a stillness stood
among the group and over the factory building. We looked down at the
bare sterility of black tar, felt the harsh texture of it under the soles of our
shoes, and the anger had gone out of us, leaving only a sore aching in our
minds like over‑ stretched muscles.
Evaluator: ________________________________
A “variety” of margin annotations should include:
T. J. stooped for a moment, his breathing slowing from anger and
effort, caught into the same contemplation of destruction as all of us. He
stooped slowly, finally, and picked up a lonely blade of grass left
trampled under our feet and put it between his teeth tasting it, sucking the
greenness out of it into his mouth. Then he started walking toward the
fire escape, moving before any of us were ready to move, and
disappeared over the edge while we stared after him.
We followed him but he was already halfway down to the ground,
going on past the board where we crossed over, climbing down into the
areaway. We saw the last section swing down with his weight and then
he stood on the concrete below us, looking at the small pile of
anonymous earth scattered by our throwing. Then he walked across the
place where we could see him and disappeared toward the street without
glancing back, without looking up to see us watching him.
Lower Order
Thinking
Defines unfamiliar
words/terms
(precision)
paraphrases
information (clarity)
summarizes
information
(clarity/logic)
Higher Order
Thinking
makes a connection to another text
(relevance)
Lists or identifies
steps, reasons,
literary devices, etc.
(concepts)
analyzes an idea, event, character, etc.;
explains how literary device functions in
a text (significance)
Identifies who, what,
where
makes a connection to a personal
experience (relevance)
reacts to an idea, event, or information
(depth)
evaluates an event, action, information,
etc. (depth)/
identifies an opposing
view/consequences (how/why) (breadth)
Makes an inference/draws a conclusion
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